From the archive, 8 December 1988: Gorbachev puts paid to Europe's fears

As the Soviet leader once again seized the initiative on the world stage yesterday, you could almost feel the earth shifting inside the UN building

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan take a stroll. In a speech to the UN in 1988, Gorbachev called for new world politics and an end to the cold war. Photograph: Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

This is not just the end of the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev sought yesterday to announce the birth of 'a new world order through a universal human consensus.' And the midwife of this new world is his promise to end the age-old European nightmare of invasion from the East.

The Russian steamroller has loomed over Europe since it first invaded, on the heels of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812. And as the Soviet leader once again seized the initiative on the world stage yesterday, you could almost feel the earth shifting inside the UN building.

The superpower confrontation across the Iron Curtain that has locked the developed world into two overarmed alliances has lasted since Gorbachev was a teenager. More than two-thirds of the earth's population have known no other world.

As that era withers, a new and more complicated world awaits us. The old and comforting simplicities to which the Reagans and Thatcher clung for so long, the Hollywood categories of good guys against bad guys, of evil empires and gulags, are giving way to something more complex and more subtle.

The first cries of that new world will be heard this week, as Nato looks at its plans to modernise short-range nuclear weapons in the light of the Gorbachev troop cuts. Dismantling six of the 15 forward-based tank divisions in eastern Europe, or 40 per cent of the punch potential for a Soviet invasion of Nato, may not bring about military parity on the central front. But it should remove Nato's worst-case scenario of a surprise attack from a standing start. By promising to reduce Soviet forces in the European USSR and eastern Europe, [Gorbachev] removes many of the reserves any Soviet attack on Nato would need. And on Mr Gorbachev's other tense frontier, the bamboo curtain with China, he also promised to 'reduce significantly' the troops stationed in Asia.

The small print remains to be studied. The head count of soldiers and tanks going back to inland barracks and storage depots, or being demobilised and their weapons scrapped, has yet to be checked and double-checked by spy satellites and observers on the ground. But Gorbachev's promise was clear: 'We are witnessing the emergence of a new historic reality – a turning away from the principle of superarmament to the principle of reasonable defence sufficiency,' he announced.

But before declaring that peace has broken out, it is worth noting what Mr Gorbachev did not say yesterday. He did not announce the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the ugliest symbol of the confrontation he seeks to ease. And there was no suggestion of an end to the military conscription that keeps the Soviet military far bigger than the all-volunteer American forces. Understandably, there was no reference to the political arguments between civilians and generals that must issue from Mr Gorbachev's speech. The grand vision of a new global order has been unfurled by Mikhail Gorbachev. Now the nitpicking begins as the old world piles up its objections.